WCF MessageContract Inheritance

Question

I am fairly new to WCF and just have a question on how to correctly get MessageContract inheritance working. A simplified version of my setup is as follows - a \"base\" mess

Answer 1

OK, first question is: why are you really using Message contracts? Do you really have a need for that??

Typically, message contracts are only ever used when you need to tightly control the layout of your SOAP message, e.g. to satisfy a legacy system you need to call which requires specific headers and such.

A "normal" WCF call should hardly ever need to use a message contract.

You define your service calls (the methods on your service) using [ServiceContract], and the data structures being passed around as [DataContract]. If you have a DataContract, you have more options as to how to deal with inheritance / polymorphism in your service (more than with the message contract construct).

Marc